Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Again

He breaks the law and his cult members have to pony up to pay his expenses:

Facing multiple intensifying investigations, former President Donald J. Trump has quietly begun diverting more of the money he is raising away from his 2024 presidential campaign and into a political action committee that he has used to pay his personal legal fees.

The change, which went unannounced except in the fine print of his online disclosures, raises fresh questions about how Mr. Trump is paying for his mounting legal bills — which could run into millions of dollars — as he prepares for at least two criminal trials, and whether his PAC, Save America, is facing a financial crunch.

When Mr. Trump kicked off his 2024 campaign in November, for every dollar raised online, 99 cents went to his campaign, and a penny went to Save America.

But internet archival records show that sometime in February or March, he adjusted that split. Now his campaign’s share has been reduced to 90 percent of donations, and 10 percent goes to Save America.

The effect of that change is potentially substantial: Based on fund-raising figures announced by his campaign, the fine-print maneuver may already have diverted at least $1.5 million to Save America.

And the existence of the group has allowed Mr. Trump to have his small donors pay for his legal expenses, rather than paying for them himself.

I should feel sorry for them but I just can’t. It’s absurd that this supposedly vastly wealthy man can’t pay his own legal bills and people who send him money are, in my mind, fools. They should be able to see through this grift by now.

From Amy Walters at The Cook Report:

For a while now, political prognosticators and armchair campaign analysts have mused that the GOP presidential primary is almost a carbon copy of the 2016 contest. A crowded field of candidates, few of whom are willing to confront Donald Trump directly, will once again ensure that Trump will roll-up primary wins and ultimately capture the nomination in 2024. 

Yet it’s also true that things are very different from the 2016 cycle. 

First, Trump is a lot more popular among Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters than he was in 2015-2016. 

A Marist poll taken in July 2015 found just 41% of Republicans had favorable opinions of Trump compared to 49% who viewed him unfavorably. By July 2016, most Republicans had warmed to the GOP nominee, but a considerable percentage still viewed him unfavorably: 65% favorable to 29% unfavorable. This month, the former president — who has been indicted in two cases, found liable in a battery and defamation lawsuit and faces more potential legal jeopardy stemming from his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and alleged voter interference in Georgia — enjoys almost universal support among GOP voters, at 79% favorable to 19% unfavorable.

Back in 2016, plenty of GOP voters were wary of nominating the former reality TV star. A CNN poll taken in August 2015 found that just 38% of GOP voters thought Republicans had a better chance of winning in 2016 with Trump as the nominee, while another 58% thought Republicans would have a better chance with someone else. The most recent June CNN poll found Republicans more evenly divided, with 51% saying they had a better chance with Trump and 49% saying someone else.

In other words, back in 2015, Trump’s vulnerabilities within the Republican primary electorate were the size of a semi-trailer. Today, they’ve been reduced to the size of a motorcycle. 

Former New Jersey governor and 2016 GOP candidate Chris Christie argues that the only way to beat Trump is to go directly at him. “If you want to be the nominee, you got to go through Donald Trump. I don’t think there’s any other way to do it.” 

That may have been a good strategy in 2016, but it’s not all that clear that it will work in 2024. 

First, as a messenger, Christie is a flawed vessel. The June CNN poll found that 61% of Republican voters said they would not support his candidacy “under any circumstances.” A recent Marist/PBS NewsHour/NPR poll found Christie’s favorable ratings with Republicans deeply underwater by 28 points. In other words, not many Republicans are even open to hearing what Christie has to say, nevermind agreeing with his message.

Beyond the messenger problem, there’s a messaging challenge as well. When asked how they’d prefer other Republican presidential candidates to address Trump’s indictment, just 12% of Republican voters in a June CNN poll agreed that those candidates should “condemn Trump’s actions,” while 45% said they shouldn’t take a stand on it either way. Another 42% preferred that the Republican candidates “publicly condemn the government’s prosecution of Trump.” Overall, almost 75% of Republicans think Trump should continue his campaign for president despite his indictment, and almost 60% think he should continue to run even if he is convicted. 

That does not look like an electorate eager to support a “truth teller” about the dangers of nominating Trump again. 

Another new poll, this one from Marist/NPR/PBSNewsHour, suggests that an “electability message” is far from compelling to potential primary voters. When asked which was more important in choosing a nominee for president, a candidate who stands “on conservative principles” or one who had “the best chance to beat Joe Biden,” only 35% chose defeating Biden.

Based on this data, it is easy to understand why many of Trump’s rivals, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence, are attacking Trump for being insufficiently conservative on everything from abortion to fiscal policy to “woke” politics. If most Republicans aren’t interested in seeing Trump’s legal troubles litigated in the primary, but are eager to support a candidate with well-defined “conservative principles,” this looks like a winning strategy.

However, I’m not convinced that traditional poll questions like asking voters to choose between “electability” and “values” or asking them whether Trump should stay in the race or drop out based on his legal liability, are able to fully capture the gray area in which many voters are currently residing. 

Reporting from early states is picking up some of this ambiguity. 

“Right now I am a Trump supporter,” said 76-year-old Karen Szelest of Indian Land, S.C., in a recent interview with the Associated Press.

“However, I think they’re doing everything they can to have him not run for president of the United States. And I think perhaps, for the betterment of the country, I may vote for somebody else because they keep going after Trump, going after Trump, going after Trump.”

“They’re going after Trump” but they just can’t admit that he’s brought it all on himself by being corrupt and committing crimes. It’s pathetic.

Nobody really knows…

The internet is recommending this early analysis from Yaroslav Trofimov in the WSJ of the failed Russian coup over the weekend. I thought I would share some of it:

One widely shared conclusion in Russia, however, was that none of the key players in the power struggle that began when Prigozhin seized the southern city of Rostov on Saturday morning has been strengthened by the ordeal that brought the country to the edge of civil war.

Putin, who earlier in the day demanded his security forces crush what he described as a treasonous mutiny, ordered amnesties for Prigozhin and his men by the evening, after Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko negotiated a face-saving compromise.

Prigozhin, who showed Wagner’s strength by marching two-thirds of the way toward Moscow with little opposition, ended up aborting the rebellion and accepting, at least for now, exile in Belarus. The Russian army and security forces, meanwhile, displayed little glory as their troops proved reluctant, if not outright afraid, to try stopping Wagner. Flying Russian flags, large Wagner columns on Sunday were driving south on the Moscow-Rostov highway.

“The entire system has lost yesterday, including Prigozhin, who is also part of the system,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment who was in Moscow on Saturday. As for Putin, he added, “it turned out that the czar is not a real czar because he couldn’t control a man from his own system who’s supposed to be under his full control.”

As a result, the authority and self-image of the Russian state has sustained lasting damage, likely fueling future challenges to its writ regardless of what happens to Prigozhin. That is especially so as the war in Ukraine, which helped precipitate the Wagner mutiny, continues raging with no end in sight, causing mounting casualties on both sides.

“Our country will never be the way it used to be. Wagner’s column didn’t move on the asphalt, it moved through people’s hearts, cutting them in half,” noted Aleksandr Khodakovsky, a veteran of the pro-Russian movement in Ukraine’s Donbas region who is now deputy commander of the Russian National Guard in Donetsk. “Yesterday, everything was hanging on a very thin thread.”

Wagner’s forces Saturday shot down six Russian helicopters and an IL-22 airborne command-center plane, killing 13 airmen, according to Russian military analysts—deaths that will not be easily forgotten, particularly inside the Russian air force, which is commanded by Prigozhin’s onetime ally Gen. Sergei Surovikin. Damage included bridges and roads destroyed by authorities that aimed to stop Wagner’s march, and a jet-fuel depot that was hit and burned down in the city of Voronezh.

Prigozhin late Saturday night left the headquarters of the Southern Military District in Rostov, to an unknown destination. Disconcertingly for Putin, many locals cheered Wagner’s troops as they withdrew from the city—and jeered the regular police that reappeared on Rostov’s streets after hiding for a day.

In Moscow, too, feelings about Prigozhin were mixed at best on Saturday. “There was a moment of total loss of control. Moscow was already awaiting him, the city froze in expectation that some groups of people would enter,” Kolesnikov said. “And people were not afraid. Putin was afraid of him, but not the country’s population.”

A volatile personality and a former inmate of Soviet prisons, Prigozhin isn’t necessarily the favorite alternative for many Russians, particularly the Moscow elites. That is especially so because Wagner’s ranks include thousands of violent criminals recruited in Russian prison camps.

Yet, the very fact that there was so little spontaneous rallying for the Russian president on Saturday, in Rostov or in Moscow, showed the pent-up hunger for change after 23 years of Putin’s rule, many Russian analysts noted.

As of Sunday morning, Wagner remained in charge of the Millerovo military airfield in southern Russia, according to Russian reports. It wasn’t clear when and how Prigozhin will leave for Belarus, and how many of his men will follow suit.

Fighters loyal to Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, who has had his own feud with Prigozhin, deployed to the outskirts of Moscow and erected roadblocks—once Wagner had turned around its columns.

Prigozhin, so far, hasn’t spoken in public about leaving Russia, saying only that he had agreed to Lukashenko’s request to cease the march on Moscow in order to avoid bloodshed. Putin, too, hasn’t made any public remarks since accusing Prigozhin of treason on Saturday morning.

Russia’s minister of defense, Sergei Shoigu, whose removal was Prigozhin’s key demand, hasn’t been seen since before the mutiny. Neither has the chief of general staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov. Shoigu maintained silence on Sunday, even as Russian social media lit up with unconfirmed rumors of his likely replacement in coming days.

“The entire world has seen that Russia is on the brink of the most acute political crisis,” Sergei Markov, a former Putin adviser and a political analyst in Moscow, said on Telegram. “Yes, the putsch failed now. But putsches have fundamental reasons. And if the reasons remain, a putsch will happen again. And it could be successful.”

Nobody knows nothin’ but at this point it does appear that if Putin wants an off-ramp there’s no need to “give” him piece of Ukraine to do it. If he wants to withdraw he’ll make one. He just demonstrated that.

You’ll be shocked

You know you want one. Now there’s a study to support why:

Millions of Americans who had never owned a gun purchased a firearm during a two-and-a-half-year period that began in January 2019, before the pandemic, and continued through April 2021.

Of the 7.5 million people who bought their first firearm during that period, 5.4 million had until then lived in homes without guns, researchers at Harvard and Northeastern University estimated.

The new buyers were different from the white men who have historically made up a majority of gun owners. Half were women, and nearly half were people of color (20 percent were Black, and 20 percent were Hispanic).

“The people who were always buying are still buying — they didn’t stop. But a whole other community of folks have come in,” said Michael Anestis, the executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, who was not involved in the study.

“The real question I wanted to answer was, What do people get out of having a gun?” said Nick Buttrick, a psychologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Why would somebody want to take this really dangerous thing and bring it into their lives?” So devised a study using mild electric shocks, Dr. Peter Venkman-style.

Seriously?

While the shocks were administered, participants were given a friend’s hand, a metal object or a prop that looked and felt like a pistol but had no firing mechanism. For participants who grew up around guns, holding the prop that resembled a firearm provided the greatest comfort, Dr. Buttrick said.

“If you came from a gun-owning household, just having a gun present makes you feel more at ease,” said Dr. Buttrick, whose study has not yet been published.

John Lennon was satirically onto something. We know how that ended.

When I hold you in my arms (ooh, oh, yeah)
And I feel my finger on your trigger (ooh, oh, yeah)
I know nobody can do me no harm (ooh, oh, yeah)
Because

Happiness is a warm gun, yes it is (bang, bang, shoot, shoot)
Happiness is a warm, yes it is, gun (happiness, bang, bang, shoot, shoot)
Well, don’t you know that happiness is a warm gun momma?
(Happiness is a warm gun, yeah)

Ah, the good ol’ days!

Do you remember #SecondCivilWarLetters? When in 2018 Alex Jones announced a Second Civil War starting on the 4th of July? Twitter erupted in mockery with Ken Burns-ish “letters” from the front?

Nikki Haley touched off a sort of reprise (though much less fun) on Saturday with one tweet It was blowback a go-go!

Seriously?

Medhi Hasan: It was so simple when she was growing up that, per her own memoir, she wasn’t allowed to be in a child beauty pageant because it was divided into Black kids and white kids and she was neither. The good ol’ days!

That memory probably makes Nikki smile now.

Roger Sollenberger: When Nikki was growing up, she sure had it simple — the president of the HBCU where her father was a professor was shot by cops in the Orangeburg massacre while protesting racial segregation

Ted Lieu: Dear @NikkiHaley: I remember growing up, when folks called me Chink. Threw eggs at our house. Slashed our tires. Called the police on us because they thought Asians like us were stealing wild ducks for food. And no one in government looked like me or you.

Jeff Sharlet: 1970s? Nixon, Vietnam, every kid in my class terrified of nuclear annihilation, getting beat up for being a Jew, my divorced mom weeping because she couldn’t pay the bills, our rusty Plymouth—you *promise,* Nikki, you promise to bring all that back?

Kevin Baron: I remember when I was growing up no Jews were allowed to be members at the Country Club of Orlando. I know because our family was one of the first. No Blacks, either. No women, either.

Charles Gaba isn’t paying for this account: If by “growing up” you mean when I was 6 years old, sure it was simple, because I was six fucking years old and didn’t have to worry about getting gunned down in my 1st grade classroom among other things.

“Obsessed with this ratio,” tweets Molly Jong-fast

Jeff Tiedrich: I grew up in the 1960s. racism, sexism and homophobia weren’t just tolerated, they were openly encouraged. I guess for Republicans that’s a feature, not a bug . but you do you, Niks. enjoy never being president

MsSpentyouth: Life was so simple in small towns where I grew up. Neighbor guy: 18 kids w/ his wife (3 killed themselves bec incest), 11 kids in next town (2 suicides). Parish priest charged with sexual assault. Police chief who refused to arrest abusers he went to school with. Simple & easy…

Mrs. Betty Bowers: Do you remember when you were growing up, do you remember how simple life was, how easy it felt? The sky was always blue. There were no winters or toothaches. Mom served us candy for dinner. Everyone got puppies. We can have that again, but we must first elect an angry fascist.

Candy canes and rainbows, y’all.

Aaaaaand… a view from a Real American:

Lot’s of palm trees and sunshine in both states but that’s where the similarities end:

Florida Governor and floundering presidential candidate Ron DeSantis traveled to California’s Bay Area this past week to fundraise and to cut a new ad.

He stands on a San Francisco street corner and portrays the city as a lawless, drug-infested hellhole that people are fleeing, in favor of Florida, because of “leftist policies.”

But he offered no statistics to back up his claims.

Here’s one stat he should know, from the CDC:

Drug overdose mortality by state, per 100,000 residents, for 2021

Florida: 37.5 (18th worst state)

California: 26.6 (35th worst state)

It’s really galling to have most of the country subjected to this calumny about California every single day by assholes like DeSantis when their own states are actually much worse off. I really wish that Democrats would start fighting fire with fire on this stuff.

Well said.

It’s been a year and we are seeing the ramifications of the repeal of Roe v Wade. It’s as bad as we could have anticipated. As she says, women are dying, families are in crisis, lives are being ruined.

By the way, don’t rest on your laurals if you live in a blue state. Yesterday at the faith and Freedom convention, Mike Pence backed Lindsey Graham’s proposal for a 15 week national abortion ban. Graham was there and proclaimed, “we’ll be saving babies in California.”

“Fucking angry” doesn’t even begin to describe my reaction to that.

Could history repeat?

In his speech, Putin kept referencing 1917, which stuck many people as … bizarre. Here’s Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic on how apt it might be:

The hall of mirrors that Vladimir Putin has built around himself and within his country is so complex, and so multilayered, that on the eve of a genuine insurrection in Russia, I doubt very much if the Russian president himself believed it could be real.

Certainly the rest of us still can’t know, less than a day after this mutiny began, the true motives of the key players, and especially not of the central figure, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group. Prigozhin, whose fighters have taken part in brutal conflicts all over Africa and the Middle East—in Syria, Sudan, Libya, the Central African Republic—claims to command 25,000 men in Ukraine. In a statement yesterday afternoon, he accused the Russian army of killing “an enormous amount” of his mercenaries in a bombing raid on his base. Then he called for an armed rebellion, vowing to topple Russian military leaders.

Prigozhin has been lobbing insults at Russia’s military leadership for many weeks, mocking Sergei Shoigu, the Russian minister of defense, as lazy, and describing the chief of the general staff as prone to “paranoid tantrums.” Yesterday, he broke with the official narrative and directly blamed them, and their oligarch friends, for launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ukraine did not provoke Russia on February 24, he said: Instead, Russian elites had been pillaging the territories of the Donbas they’ve occupied since 2014, and became greedy for more. His message was clear: The Russian military launched a pointless war, ran it incompetently, and killed tens of thousands of Russian soldiers unnecessarily.

The “evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped,” Prigozhin declared. He warned the Russian generals not to resist: “Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation we see above our heads.” The snarling theatricality of Prigozhin’s statement, the baroque language, the very notion that 25,000 mercenaries were going to remove the commanders of the Russian army during an active war—all of that immediately led many to ask: Is this for real?

Up until the moment it started, when actual Wagner vehicles were spotted on the road from Ukraine to Rostov, a Russian city a couple of miles from the border (and actual Wagner soldiers were spotted buying coffee in a Rostov fast-food restaurant formerly known as McDonald’s), it seemed impossible. But once they appeared in the city—once Prigozhin posted a video of himself in the courtyard of the Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov—and once they seemed poised to take control of Voronezh, a city between Rostov and Moscow, theories began to multiply.

Maybe Prigozhin is collaborating with the Ukrainians, and this is all an elaborate plot to end the war. Maybe the Russian army really had been trying to put an end to Prigozhin’s operations, depriving his soldiers of weapons and ammunition. Maybe this is Prigozhin’s way of fighting not just for his job but for his life. Maybe Prigozhin, a convicted thief who lives by the moral code of Russia’s professional criminal caste, just feels dissed by the Russian military leadership and wants respect. And maybe, just maybe, he has good reason to believe that some Russian soldiers are willing to join him.

Because Russia no longer has anything resembling “mainstream media”—there is only state propaganda, plus some media in exile—we have no good sources of information right now. All of us now live in a world of information chaos, but this is a more profound sort of vacuum, because so many people are pretending to say things they don’t believe. To understand what is going on (or to guess at it), you have to follow a series of unreliable Russian Telegram accounts, or else read the Western and Ukrainian open-source intelligence bloggers who are reliable but farther from the action: @wartranslated, who captions Russian and Ukrainian video in English, for example; or Aric Toler (@arictoler), of Bellingcat, and Christo Grozev (@christogrozev), formerly of Bellingcat, the investigative group that pioneered the use of open-source intelligence. Grozev has enhanced credibility because he said the Wagner group was preparing a coup many months ago. (This morning, I spoke with him and told him he was vindicated. “Yes,” he said, “I am.”)

But the Kremlin may not have very good information either. Only a month ago, Putin was praising Prigozhin and Wagner for the “liberation” of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, after one of the longest, most drawn-out battles in modern military history. Today’s insurrection was, by contrast, better planned and executed: Bakhmut took nearly 11 months, but Prigozihin got to Rostov and Voronezh in less than 11 hours, helped along by commanders and soldiers who appeared to be waiting for him to arrive.

Now military vehicles are moving around Moscow, apparently putting into force “Operation Fortress,” a plan to defend the headquarters of the security services. One Russian military blogger claimed that units of the military, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the FSB security service, and others had already been put on a counterterrorism alert in Moscow very early Thursday morning, supposedly in preparation for a Ukrainian terrorist attack. Perhaps that was what the Kremlin wanted its supporters to think—though the source of the blogger’s claim is not yet clear.

But the unavoidable clashes at play—Putin’s clash with reality, as well as Putin’s clash with Prigozhin—are now coming to a head. Prigozhin has demanded that Shoigu, the defense minister, come to see him in Rostov, which the Wagner boss must know is impossible. Putin has responded by denouncing Prigozhin, though not by name: “Exorbitant ambitions and personal interests have led to treason,” Putin said in an address to the nation this morning. A Telegram channel that is believed to represent Wagner has responded: “Soon we will have a new president.” Whether or not that account is really Wagner, some Russian security leaders are acting as if it is, and are declaring their loyalty to Putin. In a slow, unfocused sort of way, Russia is sliding into what can only be described as a civil war.

If you are surprised, maybe you shouldn’t be. For months—years, really—Putin has blamed all of his country’s troubles on outsiders: America, Europe, NATO. He concealed the weaknesses of his country and its army behind a facade of bluster, arrogance, and appeals to a phony “white Christian nationalism” for foreign audiences, and appeals to imperialist patriotism for domestic consumption. Now he is facing a movement that lives according to the true values of the modern Russian military, and indeed of modern Russia.

Prigozhin is cynical, brutal, and violent. He and his men are motivated by money and self-interest. They are angry at the corruption of the top brass, the bad equipment provided to them, the incredible number of lives wasted. They aren’t Christian, and they don’t care about Peter the Great. Prigozhin is offering them a psychologically comfortable explanation for their current predicament: They failed to defeat Ukraine because they were betrayed by their leaders.

There are some precedents for this moment. In 1905, the Russian fleet’s disastrous performance in a war with Japan helped inspire a failed revolution. In 1917, angry soldiers came home from World War I and launched another, more famous revolution. Putin alluded to that moment in his brief television appearance this morning. At that moment, he said, “arguments behind the army’s back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe, [leading to] destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war.” What he did not mention was that up until the moment he left power, Czar Nicholas II was having tea with his wife, writing banal notes in his diary, and imagining that the ordinary Russian peasants loved him and would always take his side. He was wrong.

Those twitter feeds mentioned in the article are well worth following. Sadly, twitter is not very useful generally for times like these since Elon Musk ruined it. Of course, Musk is a big Russia fan so I suppose that makes sense.

Update: It appears that Prigozhin has thrown in the towel?

“They were going to dismantle PMC Wagner. We came out on 23 June to the March of Justice. In a day, we walked to nearly 200km away from Moscow. In this time, we did not spill a single drop of blood of our fighters. Now, the moment has come when blood may spill. That’s why, understanding the responsibility for spilling Russian blood on one of the sides, we are turning back our convoys and going back to field camps according to the plan.”

It’s going to take a while to sort out what’s happening here or what’s going to happen now. Let’s just say the whole thing shows the situation in Russia is very unstable.